take luxury seriously; one called Snel-
grave's gold watch "a pretty F oot- ball"
and gave it a kick They insisted that their
true motive was not greed but justice.
One pirate captain asserted that "their
Reasons for going a pirating were to re-
venge themselves on base Merchants,
and cruel Commanders of Ships." More-
over, the pirate captains had almost no
special privileges, and slept on deck like
their men, not in beds. Pirate
life seemed a medley ofindul-
gence and strict equity, mock-
ery and idealism, anarchy and \ \ \
discipline. Snelgrave regretted \ \
\
that his observations of them
were "not so coherent as I
could wish," and could not de-
cide what they added up to.
What if they added up to a
picture of working-class heroes? In 1980,
the Marxist historian Christopher Hill,
wondering what became of the king-be-
heading spirit of the English Civil War,
noted that when the monarchy was re-
stored, in 1660, many radicals emigrated
to the Caribbean. Their revolutionary
idealism may have fallen like a lit match
into the islands' population of paupers,
heretics, and transported felons. Elaborat-
ing Hill's suggestion, the historian Mar-
cus Rediker spent the following decades
researching pirate life and came to believe
that pirate society "built a better world"-
one with vigorous democracy, economic
fairness, considerable racial tolerance, and
even health care-in many ways more
praiseworthy than, say, the one that Snel-
grave supported by slave trading. True, pi-
rates were thieves and torturers, but there
was something promising about their
alternative to capitalism. Other scholars
claimed pirates as precursors of gay liber-
ation and feminism. But, as pirate schol-
arship flourished, so did dissent. In 1996,
David Cordingly dismissed the idea of
black equality aboard pirate ships, point-
ing out that a number of pirates owned
black slaves, and warned against glamor-
izing criminals renowned among their
contemporaries for "their casual brutal-
ity." Before long, the contending voices
of pirate studies had become a "cacoph-
ony," according to one academic. Mean-
while, the idea that pirates are in some
way dissident, rather than merely crimi-
nal, entered the mainstream. During the
recent spate of pirate activity off the coast
of Somalia, one pirate told the Times,
74 THE NEW YORKER, SEPTEMBER 7, 2009
'We don't consider ourselves sea bandits.
We consider sea bandits those who ille-
gally fish in our seas and dump waste in
"
our seas.
A brisk, clever new book, "The In-
visible Hook" (Princeton; $24.95), by
Peter T. Leeson, an economist who
claims to have owned a pirate skull ring
as a child and to have had supply-and-
demand curves tattooed on his right bi-
# ceps when he was seventeen,
offers a different approach.
Rather than directly challeng-
ing pirates' leftist credentials,
Leeson says that their appar-
ent espousal of liberty, equal-
ity, and fraternity derived not
from idealism but from a de-
sire for profit. "Ignoble pirate
motives generated 'enlight-
ened' outcomes," Leeson writes. Whether
this should comfort politicians on the left
or on the right turns out to be a subtle
question.
T here have probably been pirates for
as long as people have travelled by
water, and their anarchic sense of humor
dates back at least to the ancient world.
According to Plutarch, when pirates cap-
tured someone who declared himself to
be Roman they apologized profusely,
even offering him a toga so that other pi-
rates wouldn't make the same mistake.
Once they got the Roman to believe in
their contrition, the pirates let a ladder
down into the sea. He was free to go,
they told him, at which point "if he re-
sisted they themselves threw him over-
board, and drowned him."
Modern piracy has its origins in the
wars that the great European powers
fought over trade in the centuries follow-
ing the discovery of the N ew World. Like
Donald Rumsfeld, Renaissance monarchs
seem to have believed in military out-
sourcing, and they cheaply and quickly
acquired navies by granting private ves-
sels, known as privateers, the right to raid
enemy ships and pay themselves out of
the plunder, a share of which theywere to
pass along to the government. If all went
well-especially if the ships taken be-
longed to the Spanish, who hauled a for-
tune in American gold and silver across
the Atlantic twice a year-the contracting
government grew a little richer. So long as
one of the nations involved considered it
legal, privateering wasn't technically pi-
racy, but the Spanish liked to put the pa-
perwork making this claim around the
necks of privateers that they hanged. The
privateers themselves, according to a 1724
account, tended to "make very little Dis-
tinction betwixt the Lawfulness of one,
and the Unlawfulness of the other," espe-
cially when peace intermittently threat-
ened to deprive them of an income. In
December of 1670, for example, Henry
Morgan ignored a letter telling him that
England had signed a treaty with Spain in
July and went on to sack the Spanish-
owned city of Panama. Morgan had
scored princely sums elsewhere, however,
so when he was eventually arrested and
sent to London, he was knighted and ap-
pointed deputy governor of Jamaica.
The men who sailed with Morgan
were known as buccaneers. They were
French and English men who had gone
native on Hispaniola, the island now oc-
cupied by Haiti and the Dominican Re-
public, and on T ortuga, a tiny island
to the north. Their name came from a
wooden frame, called a boucan by the
Carib Indians, on which they smoked
wild boar and cattle. They were the ones
who developed the first pirate code of eth-
ics, the Custom of the Coast, at the core
of which was an explicit agreement about
the sharing of booty, power, and respon-
sibility called a chasse partie. Before attack-
ing Panama, for instance, the buccaneers
stipulated that Morgan was to get a hun-
dredth part of the loot, with the rest di-
vided into shares for the more than two
thousand men in the expedition: each
captain under Morgan was to get eight
shares, and each man one share. They also
allocated set-asides for professionals (two
hundred pesos for each surgeon, a hun-
dred for each carpenter), incentive pay-
ments (fifty to anyone who captured a
Spanish flag, five to anyone who threw a
grenade into a fort), and compensations
for injury (a hundred for a lost eye, fifteen
hundred for two legs). Pirates usually fur-
ther agreed to maroon pilferers, to give
"good quarter" to any victim who asked,
and to keep their weapons clean. Some-
times they went so far as to forbid gam-
bling and onboard romance ("No Boy or
Woman to be allowed amongst them,"
one such contract read) and to restrict
late-night drinking to the deck
Because criminal agreements have no
legal force, it's tempting to think of pirate
articles as quaint-if not misguided, con-